I don't even play video games that often, and it's usually the same three over and over again, but I'm definitely adding the video game blog Inverted Castle (invrtdcstle_rss) to my reading list, since I now find myself obliged to repost, like, half of it:

a 3D fighting game that features little girls beating up on each other; nothing new there. The kicker, however, is that any damage you do to your opponent will slowly regenerate unless... wait for it... you take a picture of her panties. Yes. A fighting game where panty-shots are the core mechanic. You don't believe me, do you? Then watch the VIDEO. That's it. The Japanese are done. They can now return to planet Japania, leaving all the people of Earth horribly confused and scarred for life.

If someone were to ask me to make a low-budget feature movie out of Dead or Alive, here's what I'd do: I'd get a bunch of B-list porn stars to play the leads, because they'd have enough flexibility and stamina to do fake kung-fu, and wouldn't be ashamed to play characters best known for their gravity-defying floppy tits. I'd film it in China, where everything is cheap, and crews who have spent their entire lives making kung-fu movies are a dime a dozen. I'd include as much "clever partial nudity" as I could possibly show and still retain the PG-13 rating necessary to draw in the 13-year-olds the games are aimed toward. Then I'd find some German company to finance the whole thing because, as Uwe Boll proves, they'll throw money at anything with a video game tie-in. I've heard it's actually some sort of tax write-off for them, but never bothered to learn the details. Trailer.

Guy 1: Tomb Raider is really popular! Let's make a game with a hot chick in it! Guy 2: Yeah, but let's make her hotter... like a red head! Guy 3: Yeah! And a hooker... um... Guy 2: A hooker assassin! Guy 3: A vampire hooker assassin! Guy 1: (barely able to speak over the giggling) Who's bisexual! All 3 Guys: And she fights Nazis!!

According to Ain't it Cool News, the Bloodrayne movie was cast only 2 weeks before filming started, Michael Madsen spent the entire production drunk, and most of the extras were Romanian whores. I can't wait to hear the commentary track on this one! Trailer.

Cloud is a very mellow, very artsy game that was created by a group from the USC School of Cinema and Television on a grant from Electronic Arts. You fly around the sky, attracting clouds to you and mushing them together to make bigger clouds, which you then either "paint" into shapes, or push against "pollution" clouds to create rain and lightning. No enemies, no time limit, no chance of losing, which makes it more of a "toy" than a "game". It is, however, very very restful, and I fell right asleep after playing it before bed last night. I recommend that you do the same tonight, but by all means do not try to operate heavy machinery after playing. [jwz: this sounds awesome, but it's PC only...]

Giantology is a viral marketing blog for Shadow of the Colossus, where they posted their "tsunami giant video". They also link to another site with pictures of the "fish colossus", and another site that looks like it's shaping up to be the "flying snake" colossus. On October 18th, the release date of the game, the site went dead, but now they're back up again, with another video of Russians digging up the "mer-cow" ("lobs-taur"?) colossus in Siberia. [jwz: also Inca giant.]

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21 Responses:

I would like to download the BloodRayne trailer .MOV file. However, the MOV file on the trailer page is 260 bytes long and contains only references to another two files: bloodrayne-tlr_h320.mov and bloodrayne-tlr_h480.mov. Trying the obvious URLs like...

I just tried the first URL I posted above again, and it worked! Lucky for me.

As for your crashing, the page says that these movies require Quicktime 7. It could be mplayer doesn't support QT 7 yet. (FWIW, FFmpeg claims they've had QT7 support since about June, by using/abusing the Windoze DLLs.)

All the Apple trailers are encoded now using the MPEG-4 H264 codec, which is what people usually understand as "Quicktime 7". Mplayer does support it: I know it because I have used it to play trailers, but it's true that it doesn't work with all of them; the new "King kong" trailer, for example, crashes.

Cloud is, like they said, an incredibly mellow game. Really great music and art. Not too much replay value, as it's basically the same game over and over again, but I'd say it's worth bugging a friend with Windows for the free download.

The funniest/ saddest part about the panty shot game is that the characters are bishoujo versions of the Shinsengumi, a very famous real samurai troop from the time of the Meiji Revolution. You can see in the screenshots that the girls featured are "Yuko Kondou" (who references Isami Kondou, the troop commander) and "Toshie Hizikata" (Toshizou Hijikata was the Shinsengumi's vice-commander).

Still, the old-fashioned camera used to take the panty shots is a cute detail XD

Boll has been stopped. The loophole in Geerman law that allowed him to get a tax break on every one of his movies even if they were a financial bomb was closed by the German government earlier this year, and will be effective by the new year.

So yeah, no more shitty videogame movies (or movies in general) from him.

Dagnabbit! This is Hunty from Inverted Castle. All this time I've been watching <lj user="invertedcastle">, and being sad that it only has 6 subscribers, and now I find out that someone else has created another feed for it! :PX

Yeah, that happens all the time when a site provides multiple feeds... If you mail support@livejournal.com and tell them that <lj user="invertedcastle"> and <lj user="invrtdcstle_rss"> are the same site, they can merge them into one user and auto-update all the subscribers' friends lists.